Facebook Introducing Social Zones?

Inside Facebook speculates that Facebook may be in the process of adding Friend Lists, aka Buddy Lists aka Contact Groups to a future release of the platform:

The two new API methods are:

friends.getLists friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

If these are indeed upcoming features of the Facebook Platform, I think this has two major implications:

1. This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their LinkedIn accounts as well.

2. More significant, this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application. Source: Inside Facebook, “Speculation: Facebook adding Friend Lists; implications for Top Friends, LinkedIn?”

I’ll take the second part first, since I think it matters less. Anyone who has been paying attention to Facebook should have known that it:

1. has always had the option to make whatever it wants, even if inspired by an app on the platform
2. was probably on the long-term roadmap for Facebook for some time
3. should not be a surprise to anyone

In contrast, the first point about privacy and security is much more interesting to me, probably since I've been talking about it for years now (at least since March 2004) and it's nice to see it making it into the usable, at scale realm:

SNS 1.0 is at risk from another powerful force, however. Although the feature sets of these tools will often fail to accommodate user's needs, a far more fundamental problem may exist in the very foundations. As mentioned we all interact within different social zones and contexts. As mentioned, our circles are interconnected and often linear (although promotions and demotions can be accelerated for any arbitrary reason). I call this the Social Context Continuum. Relationships evolve, or devolve, over time. As more information is exchanged, the bonds change based on a number of criterion -- trust being near the top of that list.

The dilemma is two-fold. One the one hand, there are not enough “shades” for tinting relationships in the current systems. Degree-based systems are meaningful only in term of understanding graphs. However, they do nothing to indicate affinity or opportunity. Graduated scales, going from Enemy to Friend only serve to collapse the value of categories as a whole — much like the junk drawer in most everyone’s kitchen which becomes a convenient catch-all for hard to place items.

On the other hand, the positioning of SNS is problematic to its long-term unevolved survival. For some users, SNS provides a unique social environment that encourages and develops new relationships. For others, the potential of SNS to create business opportunities provides significant value. Unfortunately, the quest for ubiquity at the same level as e-mail or cell phone address books is extremely difficult to pass, at least by current standards.

In the end, these two forces will come together and result in a growing sense of frustration for users. This frustration will stem from the inability to manage more of their network from a single location. The result will be that users will be forced to maintain identities in numerous locations without the ability to easily leverage previously efforts. Some may argue this will prove to be a much smaller problem than it seems, however, we live in a culture of consolidation and where time and other pressures continuously drive us towards new forms of “efficiency”.

Source: SocialTwister, “The SNS Differentiation Challenge”

Interestingly enough, Facebook could have the requisite level of engagement and momentum to materialize the “Social Context Continuum” for a large part of the internet populous.

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